When Autumn was a little girl, she and her sisters used to climb into their mother’s bed at sunset and beg her for stories. The queen wasn’t a good storyteller, and she didn’t have the patience to learn many different tales. But there was one that she knew by heart, and it was the story of why their land was cursed.

Once upon a time, there was a great king who undertook a perilous journey across the mountains to find a new land for his people, who had been chased from their home by war. He discovered the vast prairies of Esternia, and split the territory into four kingdoms, one for each of his sons. But his court wizard was an evil, twisted man, who also wanted a kingdom for his own.

There are many versions of this story, which ascribe all manner of sins, desires, or dark deeds to the wizard. But what they all agree on is that one night, in the height of summer, the Evil Wizard slit his king’s throat and used his blood in a dark ritual meant to bind the land of Esternia to his will.

The four sons brought their armies together to avenge their father, and managed to drive the wizard back to a forest at the foot of the mountains. There, it is said that he lured them into an ambush. The wizard killed each of the four sons, and their bones he ground into dust, and this dust he used to salt the limits of the forest. He claimed that long, dark stretch of land as his kingdom, and declared that no living being could cross into the woods without his curse befalling them.

Since that day, a thousand years ago, the Evil Wizard King has haunted the borders of Esternia, cutting their people from the mountains and the realms beyond. For a thousand years, the four kingdoms have had to walk the tightrope between placating him and suffering his wrath. Sometimes, evil spirits pour out of his lands, slipping out from between the trees and slaughtering everything in their path. Other times, droughts befall the prairies for months — or even years. In his cruelty, the wizard banishes all clouds from the sky and holds back the rain, so that the sun burns their harvest down in the fields.

Every few decades, the monarchs of the four kingdoms decide to fight back; they raise their armies and march upon the forest, intent on ridding the land of the Wizard King once and for all. They always fail. The knights and soldiers make their ways into the trees, and do not return. The years immediately afterwards are dark ones. The spirits come in greater numbers; the earth shakes under their feet.

Inevitably, this is then followed by another bout of placating. The remaining royal families bow and scrape; they send tribute to the forest in a bid for forgiveness. Vast riches in elaborately carved coffers, the finest fruits of their orchards, and richly embroidered textiles get piled up on chariots and brought to the very edge of the trees for a tense hand-off.

The king, himself, never appears. Twisted, dark creatures emerge from the forest in his stead. These strike fear in all who see them, for they seem to be neither men nor beasts, but something in between. They wear dark masks to cover their faces but their horns, claws and sometimes even hooves mark them for the unnatural things they are. No one knows how these servants of the king come to be, whether he creates them of whole cloth or grows them out of animals — or worse, whether they were once people and this is what his curse does to those who breach his forest. No one has ever dared ask. In any case, these servants seldom talk. They accept the tributes wordlessly then disappear back into the woods, never to be seen again. Eventually, the wrath of the king stops coming down on the prairies so heavily, and life goes on.

But there is one type of tribute that always get a reaction from the creatures, and seem to warrant the attention of the Dark King himself: brides.

Every few years, one of the kingdoms will try their hand at finding the Evil Wizard King a wife. They will put forward a princess — or a duchess, or any number of pretty well-bred young maiden — and offer the Dark King some agreement regarding alliances or succession, in the vain hope that he will act like a proper king, for once, and engage in a spot of diplomacy. The answer is always the same: the poor young thing is invited to his castle for ‘consideration’. If she is still — well, the word he uses is ‘eligible’, but everyone knows it means ‘alive’ — if she is still eligible in two months’ time, then the Wizard King will agree to a wedding.

No maiden has yet reached the two-month mark. None of these offers are ever sincere, in any case. The brides are merely another tribute to be given away as a necessary sacrifice to appease a capricious neighbour. The girls chosen are usually sick and already dying, or they volunteer for reasons no one dares to ask about. It has been a long time since someone went unwilling to the forest, not that this makes the whole thing any less of a tragedy. Merely a more palatable one.

No one knows what, exactly, the Evil Wizard King does with the princesses and maidens and other assorted young girls that are sent up to his castle. Perhaps he does marry them. Or he uses them in dark magic rituals. Or he eats them. But there is one thing that everyone knows for certain: his rage calms down when a wife is sent to him, so surely he must be doing something with them.

When Autumn was fifteen years old, her father went to war.

When she was twenty-five, her mother decided that she was pretty enough — and expendable enough — to be given as an offering to the Dark King.